My Mother's Library

My mother had a notion when she was a little girl in Kentucky, and one time she shared it with me.  She said she liked to imagine there was a library in heaven with all the books: all the books that ever had been written as well as all the books that ever could be written.

"And if you wanted to be a writer," she explained, "all you had to do was get into that library and go to the shelves of books that hadn't been written yet, and just take one and copy it."

She told me this back when I was an aspiring cartoonist, and we talked about the idea when I gave up cartooning for writing.  I think about it often, and the more I think about it, the truer it seems to me.  I know that everything I write is only a rough approximation of the story that could have been written.  Mur always said she was my biggest fan and severest critic, and that she was; she praised whatever was good in my work, but criticized whatever she felt fell short of the ideal form in that ideal library.

Today was her birthday.  She died May 20, my birthday. She did not get to see my first novel published, nor my second.  But she would have been so proud.  I still dream about her.  The dreams are never about her, but she's in them, just a casual participant and commentator on my ordinary dreamscape.

J K Rowling said she always imagined paradise would be some kind of library.

I hope so.  I'd like to think of my mother laughing and shaking her head, turning the page in my next story.